Mentorum Solutions, an educational technology start-up that focuses on adaptive ecoaching and training platforms, and Mobilogie developed an innovative tool to make learning easy and accessible.

In 2013, Mentorum were selected out of 77 participants and awarded $1.3 million from the Canada Media Fund to build, enhance and commercialize this innovative adaptive platform.

Mentorum Solutions provide:

Software as a service (SaaS)

Custom-tailored, mobile, eLearning products that are fun, innovative and effective.

Mentorum Solutions is also associated with Language Research Development Group (LRDG), one of the Canadian government’s biggest suppliers of English and French blended language learning and testing.

Mentorum Solutions spearheaded four different teams to make this particular project a reality. It’s just the latest addition to Mentorum Solutions’ extensive product portfolio.

Founded in 2008

Third mobile initiative for MSI

Partners with Mobilogie since 2013

Adapt2me

“Adapt2me is a mobile suite of apps for iOS devices. Its algorithm dynamically distributes content according to the user’s cognitive profile and goals. Through machine learning, the suite adapts to users’ strengths and weaknesses. It also enhances the interactions between teachers and students. This patentspending, adaptive technology can be applied to any situation where users’ cognitive abilities must be evaluated.”

Developing a new educational approach

Learning a new language isn’t easy. It takes time and willpower. However, Mentorum Solutions isn’t just another language learning method. It’s a new tool that allows you to take learning wherever you are. It empowers Mentorum Solutions’ clients by placing all the necessary information to master a new language at their fingertips.

Building a toolbox of skills

The app is mostly targeted at specific public sectors. By partnering with Mentorum Solutions, team leaders can use the interactive environments, web-based or mobile, to train and evaluate their employees. This way, employees improve their professional development by learning several skills, ranging from reading and writing to comprehension and conversation.

Mobility within education

There is a different learning process on mobile. As opposed to being given private lessons or group lectures, or even learning by yourself (reading books or doing online exercises for example), the mobile method is completely different. It is a step-by-step method, where learners feel the progression in their learning and are not overwhelmed in a multitude of concepts. Lessons and focus are targeted to each individual’s particular strenghts and weaknesses.

Students can work at their own pace and have realtime personalized feedback, which is not a classroom’s reality. There is a great gap between education in 2015 and education 10-20 years ago, as the population’s access to technology increases. We witness a true shift in behaviour due to the use of iPhone and tablet on a daily basis, and today’s education can benefit from that. Mobility in education means: a greater access to information, specific and targeted learning based on students’ capacities, and learning on the go, anywhere we go.

“Every day, every lesson, can be individualized for each learner. ”

– Curriculum Associates, The Transformational Power of Education Technology

The perks of mobile in the learning process

Motivation

When students are waiting for a bus, sitting in a coffee shop or even travelling, they can easily resume their learning by completing activities or taking quizzes on their mobile. Optimizing our time is of great importance today, which is why combining waiting time and learning is a great solution.

Accessibility

Mobile learning is accessible. With more than 6.9 billion mobile subscriptions today, developing a learning app helps target a wide audience of people wanting to learn. A cellphone or tablet is a tool that one cannot neglect when it comes to reaching the community. With mobile, anyone is entitled to a learning experience anytime and anywhere.

Adaptability

Content can be adapted to fit better on a mobile format, both in terms of design and learning. Progression is easier to track during lessons with the real-time progress feedback feature. It is definitely a game changer for the user. It helps boost his confidence in his learning capabilities.

“Mobilogie understood perfectly the R&D dimension of the project right from the get-go. They managed and accommodated the project’s weekly changes well. The adaptability of the team and the project manager’s patience played huge roles in ensuring the successful outcome for the project.”

The learning process

The Adapt2me app offers a multitude of different learning activities and dialogues exercises. It allows the learner to develop specific skills to communicate better and learn faster. Every user goes through 3 levels: beginner, intermediate and advanced. In order to reach the next level, the user needs to successfully complete all the activities from the previous level.

Activities

Each activity contains instructions as to how to complete the following questions and a brief description of the grammatical rules. No need to read several pages to understand the critical information about the specific learning. Activities range from categorization of words, conjugation of nouns and verbs, completion of sentences, understanding the relationship between words and the vocabulary basics.

Dialogues

There is both a script and a video to help the learners practice their reading and speaking skills in the dialogue activities. You can also interact with your coach on a regular basis or through the app’s online appointment functionality. This is definitely a plus, as you will never be stoped at a difficult question with no one to help you. And tutors will even rehearse the dialogues with you to improve both your grammar and fluency.

Design

This project is the biggest collaboration Mobilogie has participated in. Over 40 people were involved in one way or another to advance it. Mobilogie was responsible for the entire mobile aspect of the project.

Design criteria

Be slick and intuitive. Since users were already using the app to learn, we wanted them to focus their attention on the material and not on figuring out the app’s functionality.

Integrate with legacy content. We developed the app’s logic to accommodate the solution’s old content. The new mobile format needed to preserve the same steps for iPhone and the web.

Achieving those criteria

Testing

One of the greatest part of the project was attributed to testing. Testing the functionalities, the steps given to the users, the instructions, the popups, the flow of the activities, the validity of the answers, and the progression within each level of the program, amongst a multitude of features.

Understanding the users

We worked handin-hand with several testers to understand their approach to learning, and therefore adapt the app to the users’ needs. We kept the most relevant features when we adapted the design of the user experience.

Iterating

Following the testers’ recommendations, we went through several iterations to arrive at a final result. One of the changes was related to the popups. Our goal: better indicate users if their answers are right or wrong and let them know what is the right answer if they were incorrect.

Creating the right design

How much effort goes into changing only a simple feature of the app?

Initial design

The first design of the result popup was a regular popup emphasizing your result and continuation.

A different approach

New question types (complete the sentences or group the words) required a new way of thinking about how to present correct and incorrect answers.

Too complicated

Having a different presentation of incorrect answers for each question style was too complicated and confusing to the users. We simplified the feature with minimalistic approach and auto continuation.

Testing popups

We created many different styles of popups for the results. Over 16 different variations were tested by the users.

An innovative solution to a complex problem

Finally, overlaying the correct answer on top of the incorrect answer and giving the user the option to toggle between viewing the correct answers and their incorrect answers was adopted. Over 12 different styles of this popup and control were designed and tested to fine-tune the experience and facilitate the learning experience.

Final design

The final design of both the “Show my answers” toggle and the “Continue” button were selected as they proved to be the best combination of aesthetic and intuitive design.

Project manager’s overview

Mentorum’s management team is a group of highly driven entrepreneurs with extensive experience in language pedagogy. Our expertise and knowledge in mobile development combined with their learning focus allowed for this amazing project to become reality. Together, we created a cutting edge solution to answer the need faced by the education sector.

“The biggest challenge behind this project with four partners is coordination. Every team needs to adjust to the global rhythm of the project. Throughout, Mobilogie was able to perfectly adapt to each partner’s speed of progress.”